1. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to a system and method for searching on the World Wide Web; specifically, a system and method for locating URLs based on incomplete or partially specified URL entries.
2. Description of the Related Art
As the amount of information available on the World Wide Web (WWW) and usage of the Internet continue to grow, search engines become an important tool to find relevant information. Many Web sites provide services for searching information on the Web, e.g. altavista.com, yahoo.com, lycos.com, excite.com, etc.
Typically, users enter keywords as search terms to find sites having information or content relating to the search terms. Search engines such as those mentioned above build site databases by crawling pages of the Internet, extracting keywords, and building an index of Web pages based on the keywords appearing on the Web pages. A site is found when the keywords entered match keywords in the index. Some search sites include the URL of a Web page as part of the text description of the Web page. Thus, there is no real differentiation between searching the URL and the body of the text. For example, if one specifies “apple” as a search term, sites having the word “apple” in the URL such as www.apple.com or www.appledaily.com would be returned as well as sites which contain “apple” somewhere in the text.
One problem with such a search and match method occurs when a user enters an incomplete or misspelled keyword. The index would yield no match or a wrong match, and the intended website(s) would not be returned. The same occurs when a website address or URL is entered incompletely. In such cases, unless there is a complete match, the user will not be routed to the intended website. For forgetful people, this problem is frequently encountered. For instance, as companies advertise their products over the media (radio, TV, newspaper), they often refer the audience to their websites. However, many people often cannot remember the entire URL heard on the radio or seen on television or in newspapers, thus frustrating the intentions of the advertisers.
As an aside, searching in computers by the use of wildcards designated by symbols (e.g., *, #, ?) is effective in locating words or terms in a document or locating files in memory. Wildcards are commonly used in directory searches in operating systems like UNIX and in text editor searches in editors such as Emacs. For example, when a file search using “*.exe” as a search term is entered, all execution files having the “.exe” extension will be shown as found by the computer, with “*” being a wildcard representing any length of characters.
The application of the above wildcard searching technique would simplify and enhance search and locating capabilities for searching URL addresses. Such search techniques have not heretofore been used but would allows users to locate URL's with entry of a partially specified URL address with wild card characters, such as “*” and “?”, where the asterisk represents any string of any length of characters, and the question mark represents any single character.
Accordingly, there is a need for an efficient and effective system and method that allows a partially specified URL entry to be searched on the World Wide Web yielding search results that partially match the partially specified URL entry, wherein the partially specified URL entry can contain wildcard characters, or may be incomplete or misspelled.